Summary
Heine's last years brought him growing fame in England – culminating in George Eliot's essay on him in the Westminster Review of January 1856 – and especially in the USA, where an edition of his collected works in the original German was brought out by John Weik in Philadelphia, where translations into English were imported from Britain and manufactured locally, and where lectures were given on him in New York and Albany. Heine noted these American developments with glee (letters to Campe, 14 December 1852 and to Gustav Heine, 17 August 1855; letter to Heine from Eduard Wiebe, 26 July 1855) and took good care to see that review copies of his works were sent to London (letters to Campe, 5 October and 14 November 1854), where – as Marie de Vos informed him on 27 December 1853 – those who tried to translate his poetry included an Earl of Westmoreland. No specimen of the Earl's translations ever reached Heine; but John Stores Smith, who wrote under the allusive pseudonym ‘John Ackerlos’, sent him his Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine with an accompanying letter dated 21 January 1854. English visitors that sought to make his acquaintance in these last years of his life included two nephews of Lord John Russell (letter from Henrietta Tedesco, August 1854). Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) retained the fascination with Heine which had first shown itself in the 1840s and which was to culminate in Monographs Personal and Social, published in London seventeen years after the poet's death.
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- Frankenstein's IslandEngland and the English in the Writings of Heinrich Heine, pp. 304 - 333Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986